It has long been known that terrorists raise funds through hostage-taking, drug-trafficking, Islamic charities, state-sponsors, and direct donations from the Salafist networks. However, The Jawa Report and its readers have recently uncovered what may be an important source of jihadi funding: e-mail and internet based scams.

Shortly after The Jawa Report began publishing the e-mails of individuals linked to terrorist supporting websites, we began to notice an upsurge in the number of e-mail scams. Most of these were the typical "African Prince" scam, e-mails allegedly sent by the son, daughter, or widow of a deposed African dictator urging help in retrieving frozen assets by the victim or some variation on this theme. However, a large number of e-mails began to come in shortly after we began doing this with an Islamic variation to the theme. Further, one of the more popular scams that I receive these days deals with Islamic investing, charities, and missionary work.

All of this could be a coincidence. Often times we make the error of ascribing a cause to a variable simply becauses of timing. In this case, for instance, our initial suspicions were aroused because we received a slew of e-mail scams shortly after readers began e-mailing a known al Qaeda supporter yesterday.

However, there is more to this. Many of the IPs trace to Middle Eastern origins. That, in and of itself, may be meaningless as there are many common criminals all around the world. However, given the recent upsurge of these scams, especially ones with Islamic themes, within minutes of us e-mailing known terror supporters, it appears likely that the two are connected.

Further, we are not the only ones to have noticed this phenomenon. Doing a quick Google search I found a number of news articles which raised the same suspicions. For instance, this from NEIN. The author shares our concerns but also worries about the potential for terrorists to use these scams as a way of harvesting information for :

While it seems that as the federal government has clamped down on many of the more obvious terrorism funding methods in this country and abroad, the volume of email schemes and scams (for both funds and data) has actually increased at an incredible rate as terrorists scramble to create new avenues of income and opportunity....

Using e-mail scams as detailed above, the terrorist are becoming more adept at not only generating income, but exploiting other avenues to facilitate terrorism activities. Unknowingly, the personal data you input, perhaps long forgotten absent of any perceptible financial loss, might serve as the basis for identity theft by a terrorist in need of a legitimate identity to enter the country illegally, using your credentials to obtain a passport, assume your banking and a credit history and ultimately, a life in this country as though they were you while avoiding the watchful yet limited eyes of the federal government.

Law enforcement authorities say evidence collected from Samudra’s laptop computer shows he tried to finance the Bali bombing by committing acts of fraud over the Internet. And his new writings suggest that online fraud—which in 2003 cost credit card companies and banks $1.2 billion in the United States alone—might become a key weapon in terrorist arsenals, if it’s not already. “We know that terrorist groups throughout the world have financed themselves through crime,” says Richard Clarke, the former U.S. counterterrorism czar for President Bush and President Clinton. “There is beginning to be a reason to conclude that one of the ways they are financing themselves is through cyber-crime.”

Online fraud would thereby join the other major ways in which terrorist groups exploit the Internet. The September 11 plotters are known to have used the In­ternet for international communications and information gathering. Hundreds of jihadist websites are used for propaganda and fund-raising purposes and are as ­easily accessible as the mainstream websites of major news organizations...

They [the FBI] also believe terrorist sympathizers, possibly operating out of Africa and the Middle East, have also begun using phishing schemes to steal identities and make fast cash after being shut out by counterterrorism measures from their traditional avenues of funding such as bogus charities.

Terrorist organizations have graduated to the Internet to steal because it reaches more potential victims and is harder to trace, says Evan Kohlmann, an international terrorism consultant who runs the Web site Globalterroralert.com.

Previously, militants used more conventional ways for funding, Kohlmann says. The Roubaix gang in France robbed armored cars to help fund terrorist activities in the mid-1990s. And the group behind the abortive millennium attack on the Los Angeles airport robbed supermarkets in Canada and engaged in traditional credit card fraud, he says.

Posted by: Rusty at 10:42 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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